Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Caymanian Crab

The little fellow pictured below was smaller than your fist. He was also climbing up the wall of our house. I pivoted the image because it looked so odd the way it was naturally after I cropped it down to him.

I'm always surprised by crabs coming ashore. Here in San Diego, our crabs are rigorously aquatic. Crawling across lawns and up walls is simply unthinkable to them. Driving around Grand Cayman, we occasionally saw these fellows crossing the street and swerved to avoid them. The crab got a comment from someone in the car every time, too.

I left the image fairly large so it might be worth a click. The little arthropod has some interesting designs on the side of his head. Or is that body?

4 comments:

What a pretty little feller! I guess some crustaceans are orange even before they get boiled.

As for where the head stops and the body starts, apparently crabs (and other decapod crustaceans) are considered to have a "cephalothorax", with no actual distinction between head and body. Kind of like spiders (except that spiders fused 6 ancestral body segments to make their cephalothorax, while the decapods appear to have fused 10 segments for theirs).